Finished the audibook of Neil Gaiman’s“Neverwhere” read by the author himself. I enjoyed the book a lot and surely will listen to or read it again at some point. It is full of great characters, has a great, imaginative story and I particular liked the idea of“people from below” being only visible to“the people from above” when being straight-talked-to at. Somehow this felt familiar.

I read Shirley Jacksons The Haunting of Hill House I believe last year and so far had only a quick glimpse at the new series on Netflix. Disappointed that it seemingly had little to nothing to do with the book I dismissed it after a few minutes already. The other day though I read this article on Tor.com which made a very good points about the series and decided to give it another try. The article was surely compelling.

During the last few days I started to more and more question my audiobook-habit. Maybe there is just too much going on recently but I realized that I have a hard time following the books and focussing on the content. I frequently found myself drifting of and then wondering what the hell has happend in the book once I’m back.

On the other hand I have started reading Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett the old fashioned way and there I have the feeling that it is easier to enjoy the words, the language and the story of course. Also it is much harder to drift off, which still happens, but then at least will not miss stuff as I don’t mindlessly turn pages.

So, I guess it’s a good idea to take a break from Audiobooks for a while. I still will finish my (large-ish) backlog in Audible but focus more on reading. Finishing Good Omens and then the new Scalzi sounds like a good way to get back into it. Of course, the next book in the Expanse series is supposed to come out soon as well.

I had some unexpected free time at work and used that to finish my first, rather complicated, Siri-Shortcut. I was looking for a way to quickly post an image to this blog and then write a few words about it. It took a bit of time, lots of fiddling and many failures but in the end I got what I was looking for.

The workflow does:

select an image

resizes the image

renames it based on input and current date (things have to be in order of course)

upload the image to my blog’s folder in Dropbox

opens a pre-filled file in Drafts where I can add some text and then use an action to post it straight to my blog, nicely with YAML header.

I’m sure that there are some steps, that I could have done simpler, but for my first rather complicated worklfow i.e. shortcut I’m very happy with the result.

Now I just have to find some images to post so that the whole effort was also worth it.